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Friday, August 22, 2014

No. 1 on our list of key ed-tech stories for the new school year is the struggle for schools to prepare for Common Core testing.[Editor’s note: This is the last in a series of stories examining five key ed-tech developments to watch for the 2014-15 school year.]

Preparing for the exams involves much more than making sure schools have
the bandwidth and devices to support every student online. Photo: eSchool News

Next spring, new state exams tied to the Common Core standards in
reading and math will be given for the first time in more than 40
states—and there are big questions about whether schools and students
will be ready.Students will be taking the exams online, and a lack of technology or
training in some schools—especially those in rural areas—could make
administering the new tests a challenge.

“We could be in trouble,” Donald Childs, administrator of the Unified
School District of Antigo, in north central Wisconsin, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“We haven’t had an opportunity to test rural schools that just got
wireless access to see if there is adequate bandwidth to administer the
exams during the state testing window.”

Childs isn’t alone in his anxiety. A national survey of school
technology leaders earlier this year found that preparing for online
high-stakes tests was their No. 1 concern, said Keith Krueger, chief
executive officer of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a professional ed-tech organization.CoSN has created a toolkit to help ed-tech leaders prepare for online
testing, and many school districts have been testing their network
capacity in anticipation of the exams. But there’s a difference between
conducting a trial run and the real thing, Krueger acknowledged.

“Everyone’s kind of waiting to see how it goes, and if they’re really ready,” he said.

Preparing for the exams involves much more than making sure schools
have the bandwidth and devices to support every student online.Read more... Source: eSchool News

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.